A game utilizing a futuristic take on one of the greatest samurai tales ever created; Akira Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai, should have quite a bit going for it. Not only does it have a cinematic masterpiece behind it, but Seven Samurai 20XX has music by Academy Award winning composer Ryuichi Sakamoto and artwork by Moebius, who is famous for his character designs in Alien and The Fifth Element. So it was really a shame to find out that this game offers nothing more than 30 minutes of fun.

Seven Samurai 20XX allows players to take on the roll of Natoe and do battle against hordes of Humanoids (read: robots). The basic premise of the gameplay is to attack with one of Natoe's two swords until your Nitoh-Ryu meter hits 100%. At this point you can pull out both of your swords and wreck shop on the evil guys. Sounds fun right? Well, it was fun for a little while, but things quickly became stale.

Natoe also has the ability to do several unique "Just Attacks" if you time your dashing attacks correctly. He can also perform a "Just Guard" by pressing the guard button at the same time as an opponent attacks you. Both of these "Just Techniques" will replenish your Nitoh-Ryu meter and allow you to go back into dual-sword mode. However, you never really need to use either until you reach a boss fight, and even then it's still not necessary.

So here you have several different attacks available to you, but it's not necessary to use any of them. You can even dash around and perform jumping attacks, but the controls are sluggish, so jumping causes more of a delay in your attack pattern than anything else. It also doesn't help that the game suffers from quite a bit of slowdown. It's not uncommon for a lot of characters to be onscreen at once, and the game really takes a dive anytime this happens.

Since this is really all you do in the game, it gets old very quickly. The potential was certainly there though. Ideally, the game developers wanted you to use the Just Guard in conjunction with the Nitoh-Ryu to create a non-stop sequence of attacks. This probably could've been a possibility, but in the midst of attacking a group of Humanoids, explosions and slowdown litter the screen and it's very difficult to tell when an enemy is about to attack you.

The development team tried to add a bit to the repetitive gameplay by giving Natoe the ability to talk to people around the city. Doing this will open up new sections and sub-bosses that you wouldn't have faced without talking to these people. However, no one has anything of true importance to say, and fighting game sub-bosses gives you nothing but a weapon to look at in the status menu. What's the point of looking at a ton of weapons you can never use? To top it off, the game has to load new segments of the level every few screens. So running around the various stages trying to talk to everyone and go to every area just drags the game on due to all the loading.

Seven Samurai 20XX could have been a solid title for the PlayStation 2. The story is in place thanks to the Akira Kurosawa, you've got a decent gameplay engine if you just added a few more attack options, cleaned up the slowdown, and actual gave you something more to do than hack and slash. As it stands, there just isn't much to this game. You do the same thing over and over, and it gets old very fast.